Awesome shredded book art installations

Despite the flak that Lauren Conrad received for cutting up old books for an art project, I still think that art created from deconstructed books is a really cool idea … particularly when they’re more ambitious than a craft project by the star of The Hills. For example, Flavorwire posted a slideshow of large-scale installations by Jukhee Kwon on Tuesday, featuring books shredded beyond recognition.

Born in Korea and based in London, Kwon creates sculptures from old books that evoke images of nature, in the form of waterfalls, trees, and spiderwebs. The first photo in Flavorwire’s slideshow shows a waterfall sculpture she created in Paris, and it’s all the more impressive when you see the full series of shots of it—currently at the top of Kwon’s website, From the Book to the Space—and appreciate how it fills the space in the center of the spiral staircase.

Describing Kwon’s creative process, the website My Modern Met describes Kwon’s states that she “destroys books in order to order to give them a new lease on life. Each sculpture is constructed by meticulously cutting hundreds of pages and then arranging them to form new objects.” And La Scatola Gallery in London, which displayed one of Kwon’s installations, explains:

The artist notes a personal and cultural narrative within her work, which came after the act of making; a feeling of freedom from restraint perhaps, or a living-through of her own migratory experience illustrated in the books themselves. Kwon creates through the destructive process, transforming both the object itself and its relation to the viewer; her work is inspired by artist John Latham, who used ideas of disintegration and the book, notably changing the form of Greenberg’s Art and Culture by asking his students to chew the pages to result in a distilled liquid version.